Mississippi Eyes Book Event at Book Passage this Saturday August 2, 2014

[links for Matt Herron and his work below]

Dear Friends and Fellow Civil Rights Vets:

I've just published a new book “Mississippi Eyes” and I'm doing a slide show and book talk at 1 pm this Saturday (August 2) at Book Passage, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd., Corte Madera.

Mississippi Eyes” is the story in words and 160 photographs of a team of five documentary photographer that I recruited and directed during the summer of 1964 in the deep South. The noted documentary photographer, Dorothea Lange was our adviser, and our mission was to record the process of social change taking place as civil rights activists challenged decades of racial segregation.

We had our share of adventures as well as some successes. Along the way individual photographers were: beaten and nearly killed by a sheriff's posse in Selma, Alabama; received hospitably by the white mayor of a small Mississippi town; invited to photograph a moving service in a sharecropper's church, and remarkable encounters between Ivy League student teachers and black children in Freedom Schools; and drawn into the heartbreaking struggle of a young boy trying to confront the murder of his older brother by Klansmen.

Our project was the first and only time a photo-documentary team had entered the field since the famed Farm Security Administration photo project of the 1930's and 1940's. /Mississippi Eyes/ is also the only book to provide a first-hand account of what it was actually like to shoot civil rights in the deep South. The book is being distributed by the University Press of Mississippi. I hope you will be able to join the party, but for those who can't, Mississippi Eyes is available in book stores.

Cordially,

Matt Herron

There's a review of the book in the SF Chronicle.

Movement photographs of Matt Herron

Search for "Mat Herron civil rights" for more on Matt and his work